Well, here it is – one of our readers kindly sent me chips to play with. So first things first – unless you have incredibly small hands there is no way to “play” with these with a soldering iron – but a reflow oven well that’s another matter. For anyone…
Month: June 2016
Christmas at Bedrock
Well it certainly feels like Christmas here at Bedrock (while I’m here, check out this unrelated item – the Ameba – looks interesting). I got up this morning to a large bag of post – including a new battery for Maureen’s Samsung laptop (though why I mention that in the…
Coming up..
Coming up in the next couple of weeks – the FriendlyArm M2 – how does it compare with the M1? ESP8285 – first look…. and the new Itead plug-in-the-wall WIFI switch. Meanwhile I’ve decided that if I keep trying to figure out why my FTDI won’t work properly in a…
Cheap Pi Screen
I have a Raspberry Pi 3 and recently bought a 5” screen from here at sub-£20: While the instructions on Ebay totally miss talking about the touch screen which does not work by default, this blog entry – https://blog.ask-a.ninja/?p=48 is absolutely bang on – the screen instructions are more precise…
Useless Pi Browser and Firefox
Why oh WHY do they keep that utterly USELESS Web browser in Raspbian? I powered up my new Raspberry Pi today on my new 5” LCD display and tried loading up Node-Red on the browser. That went well until I tried to edit a function – blank white window.…
A Brighter Node Red
Just today – an upgrade notice for Node-Red appeared in my in-box. Upgrade details are here. What is Node-Red? Details here – if you’re not using it or at least investigating it – you may be missing out. Now, the support guys (Google groups here) are VERY clear about required…
Cheap IOT Solution and the M1
Recently I blogged about an update to pricing for the Sonoff mains control units – now down to £3.50 ($4.85) and our readers even reminded us of some potentially great software for those units (as well as my own but then mine is more of a kitchen sink approach and…
Cheapest IOT on the Planet
You’ve seen me writing about SONOFF before, several times – and you’ll see it again – but today I’m writing about one thing (for now) – “MUCH CHEAPNESS” to quote a last-century holiday advert. I would be very much surprised if the Sonoff WIFI is NOT the cheapest WIFI mains…
Gear S2 Classic and Home Control
For a change from processor boards, let me tell you about my new WATCH. For a long time I’ve been a faithful Pebble user, the watch has a week’s battery life, a display you can read in sunlight and a host of applications. I had one of the very originals…
Ravpower the ultimate Pi UPS?
And now including – the MONSTER version. Just a short while ago, I just bought this 16750maH USB battery unit (charger) with no prior knowledge of the company – on the recommendation of my pal Aidan who does our PCBs for Esp8266. I have a specific requirement – which many…
Coming up this week
Coming up, reviews of FriendlyArm’s latest offerings – the NanoPC-T3 and the little M1. I’ll cover both of these later in the week with testing etc.. but for now a taster of the more powerful unit. You may recall I have the older NanoPC-T2 running Debian as user PI –…
Anonymous
Just a quick note folks for anyone new looking in. I’ve had some emails in recently which were generally just links with no explanation – and usually the word anonymous or similar was in the email address. For the sake of clarity, I have to approve all new incoming emails…
ESP8266 and Nextion Updates
This one will be on-going.. so the plan was to write a blog about the latest version of our little ESP-12 board and it working with the new Nextion display board. But as happens in life from time to time, it all went wrong at the Nextion end. However… Our…
FriendlyArm NanoPC T2
You may recall some time ago I did a review of the FriendlyArm NanoPi 2, a very nice little SBC indeed, here is the review, but of course time moves on and the Raspberry Pi 3, Banana Pi 3 and others have reached the shops, raising the bar and our…
Geolocated Augmented Reality
I don’t normally do links based on incoming mail but I spotted this request from Gary Baker in my inbox this morning – a proposal for a project – and actually it looks quite interesting so I’m passing it on. See for yourself.. http://gary-baker.blogspot.com.es/2016/06/geolocated-augmented-reality-project.html – reply directly to Gary if…
Samba on Raspberry Pi
This brief article should help Raspberry Pi users who like me are merely dabbling in Linux but generally use Windows machines. Sick of accessing your Raspberry Pi (or Pis) by IP address? Here’s a solution. I’ve used Samba before with mixed success. I don’t even want to access Pi files…